Educational Entertainment

A serious game, according to Wikipedia, is defined as “a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment.” The Garbage Game is a telling example of this kind. Its primary goal is to come up with a plan about how to dispose garbage in NYC. In this game, the player is required to choose one out of three or four solutions for each question about how to deal with certain kind of garbage. At last, a summarization of possible results according to a plan is provided. The results varied from player to player, as shown by the pictures.

Students’ language learning would benefit from finishing this game. One patent objective is to comprehend the situation or the current question, since answering each question requires extensive reading skill. Also, after each answer has been chosen, a description resulted from the answer is provided for players. This format is educational rather than of pure entertainment. Another objective is to have the student to write a report about their own plan, using answers to each question, the descriptions afterwards, and the data in the summarization part. This game would be well adjusted to accomplish reading and writing goals in this way.

In order to see whether the objectives are achieved, the final report serves an efficient assessment. A meaningful report requires 1) the data resulted from 2) the solutions to tackle 3) each problem or issue. Of course, the premise of this job is to, by extensive reading, understand issues involved in this game, so that the player’s production would make sense.

Gamify your language teaching process!

The term, gamification, according to “7 Things You Should Know About Gamification”, is defined as “the application of game elements in non-gaming situations, often to motivate or influence behavior.” In language teaching, the teacher uses games as pedagogical tools to achieve teaching objective. The games are engrossing enough to attract students in order to facilitate their learning process. By developing intrinsic motivation, gamification provides a systematic medium to maximize language-learning efficiency.

I never thought that games could be educational, so I started trying an “escape the room game”, named The Heart of Tota. I tried to finish it for a long time, continually clicking every single object and hoping a little progress. At last, I have to resort to its walkthrough, but at that time I lost all my patience and was exhausted. Because there is not too much vocabulary involved to finish this game, I started to think about other language learning objectives, such as communication using the target language. I would use pair work in finishing the game of this kind. By interacting with each other in target

languages, students would solve the mysterious problem cooperatively. They will scaffold and negotiate to share their ideas and the teacher, as an expert, will provide graduated hints, within their flow or comfortable zone, as defined in A Comparison of Computer Game and Language-LearningTask Design Using Flow Theory.  The major goal for students is to communicate as much as possible, so a walkthrough will not be provided explicitly. Only when they are stuck after adequate communications, the teacher would pinpoint where they are and present solutions based on its walkthrough.

The assessment of whether they have achieved the communicative objective could be impractical in that they could use body languages instead of discourse in their interactions. However, when the teacher’s advises are needed, they have to report where they are and what is the problem, by summarizing previous and current situation. In this way, the teacher could monitor their progresses in person.

Inspirations from Twitter for Teaching

How to monitor what students tweet about their assignments? How to follow each student’s thoughts and progresses, with thousands of tweets continually coming in?

Those questions are haunting me all these days since I was introduced the educational purpose of using Twitter. Fortunately, when I read Teach with Twitter? Read This! by Michelle Pacansky-Brock, I found the trick lies in using the hashtag, which is the easies and the least cumbersome way to track your students’ new tweets. Once the students are asked to add hashtag on related topic, the Twitter will automatically archive their interactions and engagements with their teachers.

Before studying 35 Interesting Ways to use Twitter in the Classroom, I never think about useful ways to incorporate Twitter in classroom in that communications in classroom are through face-to-face interaction rather than through machines without actually talking to each other. However, it indeed casts some lights to my future teaching insights. Firstly, Twitter provides a platform for me to enhance learning outsides the classroom. Like what is proposed in the article, students could follow experts and thus communicate with them, which enabling the students to absorb practical and most current knowledge in related fields. In addition, they could share what they have gathered through those inspiring

communications to their classmates and/or followers. Secondly, it is a rather good tool to monitor students’ learning process. One advantage of using microblogging rather than normal blog is that microblogging appears less formal and more prompt. If the students find it is lengthy and tiresome to format blogs, they would love to tweet. As for teachers, they could get instant feedback of what they require students to do and what their problems and difficulties. Thus teachers could provide immediate suggestions to clear any possible obstacles for students.

TwitterChat -- A Must-have Teaching Tools!

Although I used Twitter before, I did not know TwitterChat and its powerfulness. It is a perfect revelation of connectivism. By following and participating a chat, one would be able to communicate directly with some professionals and even pundits, and get novel advices immediately. Like what Mark Barnes said in his Blog What is a Twitter Chat andHow Can It Help YOU in 15 Minutes or Less that “you can get a wide variety of resources […] all tailored to your interests and questions” and that “you can get all these goodies in just 10-15 minutes!”

After I participated a chat #hcspdl, which I found unexpectedly, I realized there were a lot people who recommended articles, projects and social networking sites. They were all fans of Connectivisim! At first, Sean Junkins, who is a Digital Integration Specialist, an Apple Distinguished Educator, a Google Certified Teacher and a STAR Discovery Educator, introduced a warm-up activity. He had us to complete a sentence that “a connected educator is __________.” Later, one of Sean’s colleagues named Stephanie Yancey, the host of #hcspdl chat tonight, started with a question: “How has becoming connected changed the way you teach?” All participants engaged in discussing how Twitter makes us connected and how connectivity helps teachers to stay a step ahead of their students.

As for a teacher, TwitterChat is absolutely a good form to build up resources for further needs. Besides, it is an excellent collector of suggestions and ideas. Most teachers are busy and they do not have right tools and time to get those things done, but TwitterChat provides a platform for them to save time! Suppose a question is posted, you do not have to stay for answers but leaves for other work out there. After a while, voila – answers from a sea of experts are available for you! It is not that you do not have time to use Twitter, but you use Twitter because you do not have time.